Congressional Power - New means of congressional power

By the end of the 1950s, then, it seemed as if Congress had lost much of
its de facto input into the making of U.S. foreign policy. But two major
exceptions to this pattern existed: subcommittee government and the
foreign aid program. In part because of its relative youth (it had been
created only in 1947), the Armed Services Committee proved much less
successful at resisting challenges to its authority than had been the
Foreign Relations Committee before World War II. That inability to defend
its turf helps explain the postwar explosion of subcommittees dealing with
foreign policy issues. Joseph McCarthy was the most prominent senator to
use a subcommittee (of the formerly low-profile Government Operations
Committee) to advance his own foreign policy agenda, but his activities
are best viewed more broadly, as part of the decentralization of power
within Congress on national security matters. Overall, the number of
Senate foreign policy subcommittees grew from seven in 1946 to thirty-one
two decades later.

Eisenhower's second term witnessed the establishment of three
particularly important subcommittees, each chaired by a contender for the
1960 Democratic presidential nomination. After the Soviets launched the
Sputnik
satellite, Richard Russell handed the issue over to his
protégé, Lyndon Johnson of Texas, who chaired the
Preparedness Investigations Subcommittee. In late 1958, Senator Henry
Jackson introduced a resolution mandating a study of the National Security
Council's performance. The resolution was reported to the
Government Operations Committee—on which Jackson, not
coincidentally, served—and over the next two years, a sub-committee
chaired by Jackson conducted a wide-ranging investigation of
Eisenhower's foreign policy that only tangentially related to the
National Security Council. From a much different ideological perspective,
Hubert Humphrey's Disarmament Subcommittee, an offshoot of the
Foreign Relations Committee, looked to build a case for arms control
initiatives. The hearings helped pave the way for the creation of the Arms
Control and Disarmament Agency in 1961.

The decentralized committee structure gave senators interested in foreign
policy questions an avenue for achieving direct influence—sometimes
by facilitating informal ties with members of the national bureaucracy,
sometimes through hearings that sought to influence political debate,
sometimes by providing a vehicle for marshaling the appropriations power.
Moreover, these three subcommittees starkly contrasted with the
ineffective tactics associated with the "limited dissent,"
showing how members of Congress could—and did—influence
national security policy even at the height of the Cold War. Until the
early 1960s, the most effective congressional criticism came from the
right. But that situation would soon change, since liberals would build
upon the tactics pioneered by the likes of Jackson and Johnson to
challenge the Cold War anticommunist consensus.

Subcommittee government also played a key role in bolstering congressional
involvement in the foreign aid program. Moreover, because the Constitution
required all revenue measures to originate in the House of
Representatives, the lower chamber used foreign aid to enhance its foreign
policy role. In another example of the power of foreign policy
subcommittees, Otto Passman, the chair of the Foreign Operations
Subcommittee, regularly used his position to reduce the total
appropriations requested by Eisenhower, and later John Kennedy, by 20 or
25 percent—an effort that was aided by the program's
consistent domestic unpopularity. Passman thoroughly enjoyed the effort:
he informed one harried Eisenhower administration official that his sole
pleasure in life was cutting the foreign aid budget.

For the early postwar period, congressional conservatives, worried about
the excessive cost and the support it provided to left-of-center regimes,
provided the most vociferous criticism of foreign aid. As long as these
conservatives remained the only opposition, a bipartisan coalition of
northern Democrats and moderate Republicans provided the votes necessary
for passage. But beginning in the early 1960s, the program started coming
under attack from liberals, mostly in the Senate. Democratic senators such
as George McGovern, Albert Gore, Frank Church, and Ernest Gruening
contended that both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations had
excessively employed foreign aid as a tool of the Cold War, showering
dictatorial regimes with military assistance solely because of their
anticommunist credentials. The senators began by offering amendments to
deny foreign aid to governments that came to power through undemocratic
means. They also gradually expanded their efforts to launch an attack on
military aid that began to veer toward repudiating Cold War liberalism
itself.

This new base of opposition developed at a critical moment, for in the
early 1960s foreign aid assumed a new importance in containment policy.
Kennedy's counterinsurgency theories dictated a considerable
expansion in military aid expenditures. And the administration's
boldest new international initiative, the Alliance for Progress, promised
a multiyear U.S. commitment of economic and military assistance to Latin
America. Unfortunately for John F. Kennedy, in 1963 Passman's
conservatives and the Senate liberals joined forces in an awkward
ideological alliance that inflicted a serious setback to the
administration. In the aftermath, foreign aid bills became a favorite
vehicle for policy riders on issues as diverse as human rights,
expropriation of U.S. owned property, and the foreign policies of
recipient regimes. The pattern of congressional deference had started to
break down well before the surge of congressional activity in the late
1960s and early 1970s.